Why telling people to unsub is a horrible defense of the game.

[Noumenon]

The content doesn't change a lot when repeating it, but that's how the game is designed. Fights are a dance and it feels good to master the dance while everyone around you can't. What makes the experience different every time is what goes wrong each time, but maybe the experience isn't very different if you don't pug.

I am reminded of this post because I was thinking of replayability and saw this reply.

Sorry, I refuse to buy into the dominant narrative among raiders today that memorizing a strict dance script by repeating it over a thousand times, straight down to each GCD and weave window, would be enjoyable to the vast majority of the gaming audience. Literally no other game is designed this way other than rhythm games, and rhythm games are niche at best.

80% of the reason why people are complaining about the lack of replayable content is, I believe, because the content itself is a script that you repeat over and over again, with zero variation. The only content with extremely high levels of non-reward-motivated replayability in the community is PvP - something that is exactly the opposite of the "dance". And personally, even with all the flaws and the garbage netcode of FF14 PvP, I enjoy it far, far more than PvE.

I am also tired of people debating replayability from the perspective of rewards (or even worse, pointless achievements like collecting 20,000 Accursed Hoards). To me, the problem lies almost exclusively with the inherent/innate un-replayability of the content.

Even if you're determined to keep the dance design philosophy:

I was a pianist for a while and I found it enjoyable. I stopped, however, when I got to the level where mastering a single Liszt etude will take months, and require constant repetition... for months. At the same time, mastering a basic Beethoven sonata (most of them) took only a few hours and playing them again and again beyond those few hours is unenjoyable too.

The same issue lies with FF14, you either have Ultimates where it literally feels like a grind, repeating the same etude again and again. Or you have dungeons where you can master them after literally the first time you've done it and it becomes very tedious doing it again and again.

For almost all players of all skill levels, there is probably an individual sweet spot where the dance takes some time to master - but not an entire month or even multiple months, like Ultimates - and feels relatively rewarding to execute again and again for a while - at least enough for the patch. But then 80% of the content would lie outside of that sweet spot, making only 20% just right for that player.

So if you really decide to stick with this, in my honest opinion, horrible design philosophy, you need to massively expand the amount of midcore content to hit the sweet spot for people who don't want to do Ultimates or Savage but find dungeons extremely tedious. Frankly, I think they failed to hit the sweet spot for probably over half of the playerbase.

Then again, this problem would be far easier to solve if you just abandoned the dance design philosophy.